"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer." - Ben Franklin

Friday, November 27, 2009

A couple days ago I got this fwd and thought it quite a "clever"! I'm sure it has been circulated before but had to share in case there are those out there that haven't seen it.

................................................................................................................................................... Christmas cards. This message is coming early so that you can get ready toinclude an important address to your list.

Want to have some fun this CHRISTMAS? Send the ACLU a CHRISTMAS CARD thisyear.

As they are working so very hard to get rid of the CHRISTMAS part of thisholiday, we should all send them a nice, CHRISTIAN card to brighten up their dark, sad, little world..

Make sure it says "Merry Christmas" on it.

Here's the address, just don't be rude or crude. (It's not theChristian way, you know.)

ACLU 125 Broad Street 18th Floor New York , NY 10004

Two tons of Christmas cards would freeze their operations because theywouldn't know if any were regular mail containing contributions. So spend44 cents and tell the ACLU to leave Christmas alone. Also tell them thatthere is no such thing as a " Holiday Tree". . . It's always been called aCHRISTMAS TREE!

And pass this on to your email lists. We really want to communicate with theACLU! They really DESERVE us!!

For those of you who aren't aware of them, the ACLU, (the American CivilLiberties Union) is the one suing the U.S. Government to take God, Christmasor anything Christian away from us. They represent the atheists and othersin this war. Help put Christ back in Christmas!

As the dean of Harvard Medical School I am frequently asked to comment on the health-reform debate. I'd give it a failing grade.

Instead of forthrightly dealing with the fundamental problems, discussion is dominated by rival factions struggling to enact or defeat President Barack Obama's agenda. The rhetoric on both sides is exaggerated and often deceptive. Those of us for whom the central issue is health—not politics—have been left in the lurch. And as controversy heads toward a conclusion in Washington, it appears that the people who favor the legislation are engaged in collective denial.

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that's not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to qualify as reform.

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.

Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

There are important lessons to be learned from recent experience with reform in Massachusetts. Here, insurance mandates similar to those proposed in the federal legislation succeeded in expanding coverage but—despite initial predictions—increased total spending.

A "Special Commission on the Health Care Payment System" recently declared that the Massachusetts health-care payment system must be changed over the next five years, most likely to one involving "capitated" payments instead of the traditional fee-for-service system. Capitation means that newly created organizations of physicians and other health-care providers will be given limited dollars per patient for all of their care, allowing for shared savings if spending is below the targets. Unfortunately, the details of this massive change—necessitated by skyrocketing costs and a desire to improve quality—are completely unspecified by the commission, although a new Massachusetts state bureaucracy clearly will be required.

Yet it's entirely unclear how such unspecified changes would impact physician practices and compensation, hospital organizations and their capacity to invest, and the ability of patients to receive the kind and quality of care they desire. Similar challenges would eventually confront the entire country on a more explosive scale if the current legislation becomes law.

Selling an uncertain and potentially unwelcome outcome such as this to the public would be a challenging task. It is easier to assert, confidently but disingenuously, that decreased costs and enhanced quality would result from the current legislation.

So the majority of our representatives may congratulate themselves on reducing the number of uninsured, while quietly understanding this can only be the first step of a multiyear process to more drastically change the organization and funding of health care in America. I have met many people for whom this strategy is conscious and explicit.

We should not be making public policy in such a crucial area by keeping the electorate ignorant of the actual road ahead.

The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate's autobiography has sold more than 700,000 copies in its first week of release -- including 300,000 on the first day alone.

Palin, a less-than-one-term Alaska governor, has even outstripped initial sales of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's memoir, "Living History." The former first lady moved 600,000 copies of her 2003 autobiography in its first week of publication. But Palin came up short against two-term President Bill Clinton, who sold 900,000 copies of his 1008-page tome, "My Life," in the first week.

On Tuesday, "Going Rogue" was the No. 1 bestseller on both Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. It also was Amazon's No. 1 bestseller in several categories, including biography, history, and non-fiction. And after ordering an initial print run of 1.5 million, Palin's publisher HarperCollins said last week that it ordered an additional million copies.

"I think people want to hear her side of the story," Jim Milliot, the business and news director of Publisher's Weekly, told FoxNews.com. "There's a lot of back and forth about her in the media and they want to know what she's about."

Both online booksellers are offering the book at steep discounts: Amazon has reduced the title by 50 percent from its $28.99 list price to $14.50, while Barnes & Noble is offering it for $17.39.

Even at such discounted prices, HarperCollins has -- or soon will -- recouped the reported $5 million advance it paid the former governor. "I think it's safe to say this was a good investment for the publisher," says Milliot. Sales of "Going Rogue" will soon break the 1 million mark and even at discounted prices, the publisher will likely make at least $4 per book.

While Palin isn't likely to start collecting royalty checks soon -- HarperCollins has to recoup overhead costs including printing, manufacturing and promotion -- both publisher and author have reason to rejoice. And political insiders says the sales of "Going Rogue" bode well for Palin, possibly providing her the forum to relaunch her political career.

"This book has allowed her to reclaim her political narrative," says Robert Costa, a William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at the National Review, who has been blogging about Palin's book. "She has reclaimed her own story by writing it."

But the 2012 presidential election is a long way off, and Palin's political ambitions are still up in the air. "It remains to be seen if these sales can be translated into votes," Costa said.

...........................................................................................Want to find out what I've been thinking, writing and ranting about lately? Then jump straight to my Chick Chats for the latest dish.